Dunkin’ Donuts Wants You to Create Its Next Donut

Last year Dunkin’ Donuts’ “Create Dunkin’s Next Donut” contest was a huge success, generating more than 130,000 donut submissions and 174,000 votes. In celebration of its 60th birthday, Dunkin’ Donuts is doing it all over again.

Through March 8, 2010, anyone can create their own custom virtual donut — with imagination and available ingredients being the only limitations.

Donut submissions will be judged based on use of ingredients, donut name and the story behind the creation.

Just like last year, contest hopefuls can build their donut using Dunkin’ Donuts’ donut-building website, creating the breakfast foods from scratch by selecting its shape, dough, filling, frosting and toppings. This year, however, you can actually save your creations and find them in the My Donuts section, download versions for your desktop or favorite social sites, and share your creations more easily with friends via social media sites.

After the submission deadline, donuts will be judged internally, with the company selecting the top 12 finalists, whose donuts will be put up for vote online beginning in April. Each of the 12 finalists will also get a $1,200 cash prize, a year’s worth of donuts, a Flip HD camcorder and a trip to Dunkin’ Donuts University to bake their donuts and meet with chefs. The grand prize winner takes home $12,000 and will have the honor of seeing their donut sold in stores for a limited time.

What’s in it for Dunkin’ Donuts?

While the company wouldn’t share exact costs around the campaign, we did learn that the costs associated with such a massive undertaking — especially in building and maintaining a site to handle the hundreds of thousands of submissions — is quite significant.

David Tryder, manager of interactive and relationship marketing, told us that there is a “substantial commitment and investment involved with the building of site, marketing, and media,” but that last year’s contest, “met expectations on the business side,” and the company, “saw a healthy response in donut sales during the promotion period.”

The bottom line is that online initiative translated to offline sales. Obviously Dunkin’ Donuts is banking on a bigger and better response to this year’s contest. We definitely expect that to be the case, especially given that Facebook is now 400 million members strong and the company reported 25,000 donuts posted to the social networking site alone last year.

Speaking of last year, let’s take a look at more stats from last year: